1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for determining a system configuration for performing a collective operation on a parallel computer.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Modern computing systems can include a parallel computer with thousands of compute nodes coupled to each other for data communications. Such parallel computers can run millions of processes simultaneously. In view of the large number of compute nodes in a parallel computer, the various manners in which the compute nodes can be coupled, and the number of processes that may be executing on each node, there exists a large number of available configurations for executing a particular operation.